Confronting the Classics: Traditions, Adventures, and Innovations

by Mary Beard

Overview

A National Book Critics Circle Award finalist, this is “the perfect introduction to classical studies, and deserves to become something of a standard work” (Observer).

Mary Beard, drawing on thirty years of teaching and writing about Greek and Roman history, provides a panoramic portrait of the classical world, a book in which we encounter not only Cleopatra and Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar and Hannibal, but also the common people—the millions of inhabitants of the Roman Empire, the slaves, soldiers, and women. How did they live? Where did they go if their marriage was in trouble or if they were broke? Or, perhaps just as important, how did they clean their teeth? Effortlessly combining the epic with the quotidian, Beard forces us along the way to reexamine so many of the assumptions we held as gospel—not the least of them the perception that the Emperor Caligula was bonkers or Nero a monster. With capacious wit and verve, Beard demonstrates that, far from being carved in marble, the classical world is still very much alive.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780871408594
Publisher:	Liveright Publishing Corporation
Publication date:	10/06/2014
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	320
Sales rank:	165,786
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.10(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Mary Beard is the author of the best-selling The Fires of Vesuvius and the National Book Critics Circle Award–nominated Confronting the Classics and SPQR. A popular blogger and television personality, Beard is a regular contributor to the New York Review of Books. She lives in England.

Table of Contents

Preface ix

Introduction: Do Classics Have a Future? 1

Section 1 Ancient Greece

1 Builder of Ruins 17

2 Sappho Speaks 26

3 Which Thucydides Can You Trust? 32

4 Alexander: How Great? 42

5 What Made the Greeks Laugh? 54

Section 2 Heroes & Villains of early Rome

6 Who Wanted Remus Dead? 65

7 Hannibal at Bay 73

8 Quousque Tandem…? 79

9 Roman Art Thieves 88

10 Spinning Caesar's Murder 96

Section 3 Imperial Rome - Emperors, Empresses & Enemies

11 Looking for the Emperor 105

12 Cleopatra: The Myth 116

13 Married to the Empire 126

14 Caligula's Satire? 135

15 Nero's Colosseum? 144

16 British Queen 151

17 Bit-part Emperors 158

18 Hadrian and his Villa 167

Section 4 Rome from the Bottom up-slaves and Snobbery 177

20 Fortune-telling, Bad Breath and Stress 185

21 Keeping the Armies out of Rome 193

22 Life and Death in Roman Britain 200

23 South Shields Aramaic 207

Section 5 Arts & Culture; Tourists & Scholars

24 Only Aeschylus Will Do? 218

25 Arms and the Man 224

26 Don't Forget your Pith Helmet 233

27 Pompeii for the Tourists 241

28 The Golden Bough 249

29 Philosophy meets Archaeology 257

30 What Gets Left Out 264

31 Astérix and the Romans 272

Afterword: Reviewing Classics 281

Further Reading 286

Acknowledgements 290

Sources 292

List of Figures 296

Index 298

Editorial Reviews

"Many of us studied classics not only to read what was written in Latin, but also because poets, writers, and thinkers had blazed a brilliant trail. Beard conveys in her survey of the subject and the people who study it the excitement and romance of that tradition. For someone who has argued vehemently against the need to be glamorous, she makes the study of classics irresistibly attractive."

American Scholar - A.E. Stallings

Offering up 30 years of pointed insights and inquisitions, Cambridge classics professor Beard (The Fires of Vesuvius) returns with a collection of primarily reprinted reviews of her classicist peers’ work that somehow manages to touch on nearly every notable person, place, and event associated with the Ancient world. But for Beard, while the classics have always been a dialogue with the dead, “the dead do not include only those who went to their graves two thousand years ago.” Rather, “the study of the Classics is the study of what happens in the gap between antiquity and ourselves.” It’s the back-and-forth sparring between betweeded Oxford dons, it’s Picasso and Shakespeare, it’s Ben-Hur and Gladiator—it’s anything that engages in or, as the wonderful title suggests, confronts that gilded and gargantuan Greco-Roman world. So, the chapter about King Minos’s legendary palace is much more concerned with how and why Arthur Evans decided to elaborately, and disastrously, restore the site in the early 20th century. The discussion of Cleopatra turns around history’s ever-changing, mostly guessing portrait, and ends with Beard finally advising that we just “stick with the Augustan myth and Horace’s ‘demented queen.’” And then there’s her fascinating, gentle dig at the “obsessive, retiring Victorian academic” Charles Frazer. All in all, a smart, adventuresome read. Illus. & photos. (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly

"In this thought-provoking collection of essays and book reviews, Cambridge classicist Mary Beard explores the reasons that ancient Greece and Rome still matter…. Lively and engaging, Beard’s scholarship brings Pericles, Antony, Nero—and other ancient titans—back to life."

Booklist

"Witty, erudite collection…To Beard, the classical past is alive and kicking—and she has the great gift of being able to show just why classics is still a subject worth arguing about."

Sunday Times (UK)

"Highly engaging."

Sunday Telegraph (UK)

"Many of us studied classics not only to read what was written in Latin, but also because poets, writers, and thinkers had blazed a brilliant trail. Beard conveys in her survey of the subject and the people who study it the excitement and romance of that tradition. For someone who has argued vehemently against the need to be glamorous, she makes the study of classics irresistibly attractive."

A.E. Stallingsn Scholar

"Beard’s essays in this volume range from humor in ancient Greece to the reputation of the emperor Caligula to the restoration of Roman sculpture. She writes with grace and wit on a vast array of subjects, and she has a novelist’s gift for selecting odd and revealing details."

The Daily Beast - Nick Romeo

"Essayists are like dinner guests: The best are amusing and erudite, the worst think they are. If Cambridge professor Mary Beard's conversation is anything like her wise and elegant book reviews for the Times Literary Supplement, London Review of Books and New York Review of Books, 31 of which are collected in Confronting the Classics, she must be very popular indeed…. Throughout, readers will learn something new or look at familiar topics afresh, alternately nodding and grinning."

The Wall Street Journal - M. Carter

"Engaging…impressive… Through her lively discussion of modern scholarship, Ms. Beard succeeds in her goal of proving that study of the Classics is “still a ‘work in progress’ not ‘done and dusted’."

The Economist

"Beard is the best…communicator of Classics we have."

Independent Sunday (UK)

"With such a champion as Beard to debunk and popularise, the future of the study of classics is assured."

Daily Telegraph (UK)

This collection by Beard (Classics/Cambridge Univ.; The Fires of Vesuvius: Pompeii Lost and Found, 2008, etc.) provides a traditional classical education, and there's no need to learn a dead language. Not only do the pieces illustrate the author's extensive knowledge of all things ancient, but they could also serve as a guide to writing highly literate book reviews. Beard's clear way of explaining times and people we may or may not have heard of makes learning not only fun, but satisfying, and her prose style is easy without being annoyingly breezy. She examines books on the decline of Latin and Greek studies and wonders why we bother reading about their decline when we really don't care about them anyway. By definition, classics are in decline, she notes, since they're about the art, culture, history and philosophy of the ancient world; yet, as we see in one excellent section of this book, constantly changing views and new translations keep interest alive. Among the other topics treated with enjoyable erudition: our fascination with Alexander the Great, in a version created by Rome; Cleopatra, more Greek than Egyptian; and Mark Antony, a foolish drunk. Beard also decries the difficulty of translating Thucydides and Tacitus, reveals that most of Cicero's writing was part of a single legal case and introduces us to Philogelos' joke book from A.D. 400. (Some things are always funny.) Beard's reviews confirm her knowledgeable professionalism as she decries the conjectures of biographers who write "careful ancient history," hedging all their bets with weaselly phrases such as "would have," "no doubt" and "presumably." While we're at it, we learn that the ancients weren't that great; they just had good spin doctors. Remember, the winner always writes the history. A top-notch introduction to some fairly arcane material, accessible but not patronizing.

Kirkus Reviews